While traditional 2G mobile telephony is used mainly for wireless communication of circuit-switched voice calls, the 3G mobile telephony has been developed to support wireless communication of packet-switched multimedia sessions using IP, Internet Protocol. For example, the communication protocols used for General Packet Radio Service, GPRS, and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, UMTS, support packet-switched multimedia services. A user subscribing to a 2G or 3G mobile access network is typically obliged to have a physical Subscriber Identity Module, SIM, or similar installed in his/her communication terminal, in order to obtain connectivity with the network. The SIM is thus tied to a mobile subscription and holds a subscription identity and various associated security parameters which the terminal must use when registering with the network in order to gain access and connectivity. The SIM card can be moved between different devices.
Recently, it has also been discussed to implement so-called “Soft SIM”s, where the traditional SIMs becomes embedded into a device and remotely provisioned or activated. The subscriber identity and subscriber identification would then be enabled without using a physical and removable SIM card.
In addition, Machine-to-machine, M2M, communication over mobile and wireless networks is expected to become increasingly important in the future. Examples of possible M2M applications are almost countless e.g. in private cars for communicating service needs, in water or electricity meters for remote control and/or remote meter reading, in street-side vending machines for communicating when goods are out-of-stock or when enough coins are present to justify a visit for emptying, in taxi cars for validating credit cards, in surveillance cameras for home or corporate security purposes etc.
However, because the subscription identity is tied to a physical module, i.e. the SIM, connection of multiple devices generally requires one SIM for each device mentioned above. Therefore, the operators generally offer the possibility to have several SIMs connected to one user subscription. However, such a solution is not that convenient to the user, because several SIMS needs to be handled. When the user buys a new device a new SIM has to be ordered, or moved from another device. This problem will increase with the number of devices that a single user wishes to attach to the mobile communications network.
Furthermore, today cellular networks provide wide-area connectivity to M2M devices, but competing short-range radio standards such as Wireless Local Area Network, WLAN or ZigBee that allow local area connectivity to a mobile communication network at a usually lower power consumption are not that frequently available, even if increased use of local networks would offload the cellular networks.
One problem with such deployments is that there is no economic benefit to providing free service. Hence, to make it profitable, the M2M devices should be authenticated somehow and their usage billed through their owner's subscription. However, it is difficult to acquire and install SIM cards in all of the devices one wishes to connect to a mobile communication network. And other forms of authentication are often impractical as well.
One known solution to the authentication problem is using a mesh routing solution. A mesh routing solution makes it possible to connect aggregated devices to a short-range radio cloud using at least one aggregating device connected directly to a base station. However, meshed devices are generally not seen from the network, therefore such a solution is not always desirable.